In 2002, a short while after I started at MySQL, I saw Lawrence Lessig present at OSCON. The
presentation was extraordinarily good and Lessig is a
tremendously passionate, genuine and compelling orator.

I immediately revised my presentation style. I stole what ideas
and style I could. While I was mostly presenting about MySQL and
PHP at the time, the ideas served me well (though the style has
at times fit me about as well as a young child fits their
parent’s clothes.)

Five years have passed since then, and I have given a hundred or
more presentations. Never have I presented as well as Lessig that
night, but I still keep trying. In a few days, I am going to have
to try a lot harder.
…

This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of
hacking session.

Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a
set of rough principles and rules for running a Free
Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of
experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla,
MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla,
MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to
good use.

For me, this was a tremendous help - I’ve been putting off
working on this for Foo Associates for some months now. It is much
easier to work on meeting the needs of customers than it is to
work on planning for the future.

The notes are still extremely rough, but both Monty and I want to
post them so that people can discuss. Also, …

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